


She Said I Was Her Friend

by HannaM



Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-23
Updated: 2013-03-23
Packaged: 2017-12-06 06:18:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/732385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HannaM/pseuds/HannaM
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First there was Aria, then Alison, Aria, Emily, Hanna and Spencer. And then, again, just Aria. But it wasn't so bad afterwards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She Said I Was Her Friend

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lightningwaltz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightningwaltz/gifts).



In sixth grade, Aria was really into astrology.

She was that weird kid who could tell everybody what their sun sign was and made charts on the internet to figure out what her classmates were all about. She wore Taurus earrings and streaked her hair green because that was the color that was supposed to give her power.

Except everybody made fun of her green hair, and it didn't look nearly as good as she thought it would. Her parents were particularly displeased with it (she was treated to a lecture on how dye turns hair into straw), and by the end she hated the color green.

Another website told her the mistake had been putting too much stake in her sun sign. Sure, she was a Taurus, but she was also a Cancer, a Gemini, and an Aries. So she streaked her hair pink, not because it was a power color for any of those signs, but because she actually liked the color pink, and pigs were her favorite animal at the time. Her parents were still mad, but it looked much better, and people stopped teasing her when she just said "Well, I like it" over and over again.

"Well, honey," her mother said, "I think you've learned a valuable lesson from this- although I wish you could have done it without ruining your beautiful hair. As Shakespeare said, 'to thine own self be true'."

"Which play was that?"

(Mike hated it when their parents referenced books he didn't know, but Aria always made a note to read them so she'd understand the quotations better, and could make up her mind on whether she agreed or not)

"Hamlet," Ella replied, smiling. "You want to borrow your dad's copy of the first folios?"

Aria nodded, and they hugged.

She was sitting at lunch, hunched over the complete works of Shakespeare when Alison diLaurentis walked into her life.

"Hey, you do horoscopes, right?"

"Natal charts, but-" Aria looked up and choked. What on earth was the most popular girl in Rosewood doing talking to a loser like her? "B-but it depends on what you're looking for."

""June 6th." Alison smiled. "Tell me about myself."

 "Um, well, you're a Gemini- so you're... really into communication, and, um, you prefer a large group of friends, because you're really social, and, well, I need more time to do the full chart."

"I'll come over after school and see how you do it," Alison offered.

And just like that, they were friends.

In the beginning, it was almost entirely wonderful. Alison confided in Aria, and Aria confided in Alison. They got friendship bracelets with their shared initial, and went to the movies and argued good naturedly about which stars were the cutest (Ali liked the older, buff guys, Aria liked the pretty, tortured looking ones).

Then one day, Ali dragged Aria to a swim meet, and pointed to a brown-skinned girl with fire in her eyes. "Let's talk to her afterwards. She looks like fun."

The girl's name was Emily Fields, and she lit up the way Aria was sure she once had when Ali singled her out. She liked some of the same movies as Aria, and all the same boys as Ali, so soon she was joining them at their sleepovers and mall dates. And that was mostly good too- Emily took the pressure off Aria being Ali's best friend and seemed to get Ali in ways that Aria never could.

"You've been grumpy lately," Ali said, while she was brushing Aria's hair. "Are you jealous of Emily? That's so sweet. Don't you know I love you both?"

Still, Aria never quite believed her. It did get better after Ali walked up to a chubby blonde who was flipping through a Sephora catalogue at lunch and chatted her up about Mac, Givenchy, Revlon and the difference between drugstore bought and designer brands of lipstick.

"This is Hanna Marin. She'll be sitting with us at lunch from now on," Ali said, in a tone that brokered no disagreement. And Aria knew that Hanna was there mostly to balance out the group's number, and she was overcome with guilt.

'To thine own self be true' was one of those things that sounded better coming out of Aria's mom's mouth or on a Hallmark card. But Aria had read Hamlet now, and it was said by a character that everybody dismissed as an old fool and laughed at. Aria was sick of being laughed at.

Hanna might have never read Hamlet in her life, but she was certainly no stranger to being laughed at. Ali affectionately called her 'Hefty Hanna', but Aria wasn't sure that Hanna heard anything but another cruel nickname.

Still, Hanna was a sweetheart. She always made sure there was plenty of food for the girls when they slept over and blushed prettily whenever Ali teased her. She told Aria with enthusiastic sincerity that she thought the only reason the green hair hadn't worked was because she hadn't coordinated it properly with her clothes.

Things weren't so wonderful then, not because of Hanna, or Emily, but because of Alison. It didn't feel like they were her equals, anymore. In the summer before seventh grade, Ali spent most of her time partying, and then telling the girls about it. The few times they were invited to parties with her, Aria spent most of the time standing in the corner with Hanna, staring at a plastic cup filled with cheap beer. Emily fared a little better, since she knew older boys who were on the swim team, but after the first hour, she would usually join Aria and Hanna. Alison would always vanish, seemingly into thin air, reappearing hours later with some impossibly built older guy.

"Parties are for hooking up," Ali would say. "You girls just need to get out there. I can't help you with that."

Hanna would stare at her belly, and Emily would stare at Alison, and Aria would look at her feet and think about all the great romances she had read about- not just in her parents' books, but in Meg Cabot's novels and things she read for fun. None of them started with a desperate girl striking up conversation with a high school guy at the house of some stranger.

Later she would broaden her horizons (embarrassingly, maybe kind of because if you added 'in Europe' to any sentence it sounded less trashy) and accept that not every hook up had to be about being desperately in love, but as a twelve year old, it seemed vitally important that her first kiss go to a guy that she would be able to remember fondly for the rest of her life.

That sort of flew out the window when Emily, in tears, confessed that she had been grabbed by one of the swim team guys the first week of seventh grade, who tried to shove his tongue in her mouth. Suddenly those girls in books seemed lucky rather than typical, and Aria felt terrible for the assumptions she'd made about the world.

Spencer Hastings was the last to join their group. She was the only one (besides Alison, of course) that Aria had been peripherally aware of before sitting at lunch with her. After all, Hastings was always one of the names announced when there were updates about early college programs, or SAT practice tests. Aria had been in World History with Spencer last year, and it had been an excruciating experience, since all essays were graded on a curve relative to Spencer's detailed understanding of Mesopotamia. A lot of good Aria's parents' advice to 'be yourself' was then- Aria's self was a self that couldn't have been less interested in early civilizations.

Being Spencer's friend meant you studied. A lot. You had to be prepared for pop quizzes, and start considering what you wanted to do with your life. That was okay for Emily, who wanted to swim, and Hanna, who wanted to work in fashion, but Aria was always left scrambling. What _did_ she want to do with her life, anyway? She couldn't make a living writing poetry that Alison dismissed as 'weepy'.

(When asked what she wanted to do with her life, Alison would always reply "Live fast and die young and beautiful, baby", which would turn out not so much ironic as disturbingly prophetic)

At least Spencer read. Though English was the one subject on which Aria had a chance of doing better than Spencer, upon seeing Aria reading Hemingway, Spencer launched into an enthusiastic tirade about his many loves, and the symbolism inherent in imagining himself to be impotent in The Sun Also Rises. Aria was not a fan of focusing on the sexual imagery over the relationships, but it was still a conversation. An argument really, but that was what you were supposed to do when talking about great literature.

If Spencer were a Shakespeare heroine, Aria decided, she would be Portia from the Merchant of Venice. Ali was Cleopatra, of course. Hanna was difficult- she was so modern, it was difficult to imagine her being anybody else. Juliet, maybe- Aria recognized some of her own passionate longings in Hanna, particularly when Sean was around. Emily was loyal Hero to Ali's Beatrice, and maybe someday Desdemona.

As usual, Aria could not place herself. She wanted very much to be Rosalind from As You Like It, but suspected she was more like Viola, who bungles everything. The cross-dressing women seemed appropriate, since Aria felt uncomfortable enough in her own skin in those days that if she knew she could get away with it, she might have disguised herself as a man just to get rid of some of the pressures of being a teenaged girl.

And indeed, she was seeing more and more of those every day. Hanna's obvious struggle with her weight, Spencer's constant need to prove herself, and Emily- well, Aria was beginning to understand why Emily had Ali's exact taste in male celebrities. Watching Emily watch Alison, Viola's speech came into her head unbidden- _how easy it is for the proper-false in women's waxen hearts to set their forms, alas, our frailty is the cause, not we, for such as we are made of, such we be_.

Aria wasn't a lesbian, she was reasonably sure. When she imagined herself in a tiny garret in Paris with a dark handsome stranger, the stranger was always male, sometimes with rakish stubble. But it was still a struggle to reconcile her hormones with the boys she went to school with. The closest to attractive was Noel Cahn, who had a sort of dangerous air about him and a charming smile. But Aria didn't fool herself that she could have anything like a romance with him- it would be a quick, awkward grope in the dark, more like, and she was so not ready for that.

"I just don't like any boys in Rosewood except for Sean," Hanna admitted to Aria privately one sleepover when they were sharing a bed. "I mean I like Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp and stuff but they're not gonna be hanging out at some party at the Cahns."

"I know how you feel," Aria said, staring at the ceiling. "I don't know how Ali and Spence do it."

"At least you're not fat, though," Hanna mumbled.

Aria didn't know what to say to that. She wanted to tell Hanna she wasn't fat, but that would be a lie. And teenage boys were cruel- her own little brother thought the nickname Hefty Hanna was hilarious.

"We shouldn't be competing with Alison," Aria said finally.

"Yeah, cause we're always gonna lose," Hanna snarked, and they both laughed.

It was, looking back on it, the first time Aria really, truly connected with one of the girls besides Alison. She had never felt like it was all right to ask them to hang out without Ali, but in that moment, Aria realized the barrier was as artifical as the one keeping Mike from reading the books their parents were always quoting.

It helped that after Ali spilled that Aria really couldn't swim, and didn't just prefer the jacuzzi, Emily offered to teach her, and actually followed up on it without being condescending, the way Aria had expected from an athlete.

"This is so great," Aria said honestly, when they were in the sauna after she had managed her first breaststroke across the town pool. "And so incredibly nice of you."

"It's nothing to be embarrassed about," Emily said. "Our swimming class at school was pathetic. I would be just as bad if my parents hadn't been taking me to swim since I was two."

"Swimming's really important to them, huh?"

A distant look came in Emily's eye. "Yeah. I sometimes wonder what they would have thought if I decided not to compete."

"I'm sure they'd support you," Aria said, thinking of her own parents.

Emily shrugged uncomfortably, and the conversation was over.

She didn't get her moment with Spencer until right before that last summer. At the time, Aria thought it was almost as if Ali was deliberately trying to keep them apart. Later, she was certain of it.

Aria found Spencer in the girls' bathroom on the last day of school, her eyes red and skin blotchy, wiping her nose.

"Are you okay?" Aria said without thinking. She wasn't sure she wanted to know what could make iron Spencer cry.

Spencer plastered on a false smile. "Fine." She turned to leave, then sighed, and turned back. "You can totally see I've been crying, can't you?"

Aria nodded.

"Shit." Spencer pulled a wet wipe out of her purse and started scrubbing frantically. "I can't go back to class like this-"

"Spencer, it's okay. Nobody's going to make fun of you for, I don't know, having a heart. They'll be too surprised to say anything."

Spencer gave Aria a long look, as if to see if Aria was kidding. "Yeah, and what if Melissa sees me?"

Aria had never met Melissa, but knew her as the older Hastings sister that was, according to Ali (in a view unchallenged by Spencer), a "queen bitch". Somehow, Aria had never understood Spencer was _afraid_ of her sister.

"I don't know," Aria said after a moment. "What if Melissa sees you?"

"She'll know something's wrong. She can smell blood. She'll bring it up at dinner, and then I'll have to admit in front of our parents that I," Spencer sniffled, "I got a D on the Steinbeck paper."

Aria winced sympathetically. "That sucks. What if you got a tutor?"

"That... didn't work out so well last time," Spencer said darkly. Aria didn't press for details.

"Well," Aria shifted from foot to foot, "what if I tutored you? I know it sounds crazy, but I got an A+."

"Really?" Spencer blinked and scrubbed her nose. "You'd do that? I know tutoring a know-it-all is the worst, so you can back out now if you've suddenly realized this is a horrible idea."

"No, really, it's no problem at all. I should have more afterschool activities," Aria said, mimicking Spencer.

They laughed and hugged, and Spencer left the bathroom.

That was one of the things that Aria felt worst about when her parents suddenly announced the move to Iceland. Sure, she had a whole summer to give Spence pointers on what was holding back her essays, but it was a commitment that had the potential to turn into more. She was finally, finally, making friends, and her dad (she knew it was her dad's fault, with the whole Meredith thing) had to take that away from her. No more swimming lessons with Emily. No more peer review with Spencer (six months ago she wouldn't have believed that was a bad thing). No more shopping with Ali and no more heart to hearts with Hanna.

But she kept them in her heart, when she was in Reykjavik and Paris and Barcelona. She went into the Blue Lagoon thinking of Emily, and studied new languages thinking of Spencer. She partied thinking of Alison, and she experimented with new looks thinking of Hanna.

And somehow, she was true to herself.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The Liar's birthdays are courtesy of the Pretty Little Liars Wiki.
> 
> All my thanks to prozac park for a fantastic beta!


End file.
